March 2013

03/26/2013

A California man has been sentenced to 30 months in federal prison under a new Obama-era law that criminalizes the pointing of lasers at airplanes in flight.

Adam Gardenhire, 19, of North Hollywood, was accused of pointing a commercial-grade laser at several airplanes on March 29, 2012, including a Cessna that was preparing to land at Burbank airport. Court filings indicate that Gardenhire then retrained the device on a Pasedena Police Department helicopter that was answering the alert about reckless lasering.

The reckoning came this Monday, when U.S. District Judge Stephen Wilson sentenced Gardenhire to 30 months, saying that "the prison term should serve as a message to other would-be defendents."

The judge rejected Gardenhire's arguments that "pointing a laser at an aircraft in flight was not really very dangerous and determined that, by deliberately targeting the aircraft with his laser, Gardenhire had recklessly endangered the safety of the aircraft," the U.S. attorney said.

U.S. pilots reported as many as 3,500 laser pointing incidents in 2011, according to FBI data, with the problem especially pronounced in California. It being California, and all.

But as the L.A. Weekly observes, Gardenhire is a pioneer of sorts, as an early contestent in what is now very much a federal case. Pending appeal -- and no indication yet that Gardenhire will fight this -- he is on the losing side. Although arguably, it could have been worse, as the new federal law provides for sentences of up to 10 years behind bars.

As you ponder that, we offer a reminder to skywriters amongst us that Canadian law calls for imprisonment of up to five years and a $100,000 fine for anyone convicted of pointing a laser at an aircraft cockpit north of the border.

Transport Canada spells out the rules on a website dedicated to the issue, replete with images of what these green laser flashes look like from the inside of a cockpit.

Mitch Potter is the Toronto Star's Washington Bureau Chief, his third foreign posting after previous assignments to London and Jerusalem. Potter led the Toronto Star’s coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he won a 2006 National Newspaper Award for his reportage. His dispatches include datelines from 33 countries since 2000. Follow him on Twitter: @MPwrites

Farmer Donald O'Reilly searches for sheep or lambs trapped
in a snow drift near weakened animals that had
just been rescued, in the Aughafatten area of County Antrim, Northern Ireland on Tuesday. At least 140,000 homes and businesses in Northern Ireland were
left without power over the weekend following heavy snowfall, causing snowdrifts
of up to 5 metres (18 feet). (Cathal McNaughton/Reuters)

When Arijit Guha found out he had stage four colon cancer and that his
insurance company was balking at paying his bills, the 31-year-old turned to
the Internet for help.

He used Twitter (@poop_strong) to publicly shame the insurance company that was refusing
to cover his $11,000-per visit chemotherapy treatments. And he joined a legion of people who are turning to a new financing tool
known as crowdfunding, which allows companies and individuals alike to connect
with an audience and make an impassioned pitch for funding.

On the website Kickstarter, for instance, nearly three million people have raised
a collective $300 million in pledges for 30,000 projects, The New York Times reports.

Guha, who died last Friday, had a modest ambition: staying alive.

In the months before his death, Guha used crowdfunding to find an
inventive way to connect with new supporters.

A doctoral student at Arizona
State University,
Guha had health insurance that covered his medical expenses up to a lifetime
limit of $300,000.

When Guha spent all of that, he started a website called Poop Strong, a
not-so-subtle rip-off of Lance Armstrong’s well-known Live Strong cancer
charity. Guha used his site to sell Poop Strong T-shirts and other donated items,
using the money for his cancer treatment. In the first three days following the site's Feb. 15
startup, he raised more than $20,000.

“My friend once said what I’m doing seems like the world’s most important
bake sale,” Guha told The Washington
Post. “It sometimes feels like this weird joke, that I’m selling T-shirts to
pay for chemotherapy.”

In July, Guha posted this comment on Twitter, taking a swipe at his insurance
carrier, Aetna: “@Aetna’s 4th qtr profit up
73%: ‘it continued to benefit from low use of health care.’ Helps they can
ensure low use.”

Within a day, Aetna’s chief
executive Mark Bertolini had agreed to cover all of Guha’s outstanding medical bills.

After that, the money raised by Poop Strong was used to
support local wellness initiatives, Salon.com reports.

Guha’s wife Heather posted a note on Facebook on the
weekend, commemorating her husband, an Internet pioneer.

“My heart is aching," she wrote, "but the pain is eased a bit
knowing that he has the support of such an amazing community of people, so many
of whom have never met him. I thank you all, from the bottom of my heart, for
all you have done for him. He is truly an inspiration (though he hated being
told so), and I will be eternally grateful to have had him in my life, and to
have been able to share him with all of you."

Rick Westhead is a foreign
affairs writer at the Star. He was based in India as the Star’s South
Asia bureau chief from 2008 until 2011 and reports on
international aid and development. Follow him on Twitter @rwesthead

Mexican artist Pedro Reyes holds one of
his musical instruments sculpted from recycled guns at the Lisson Gallery on
Tuesday in London. Reyes received 6,700
destroyed weapons from the Mexican government from which he sculpted two groups
of instruments. (Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

The first, a series titled "Imagine", is an orchestra of 50 instruments, from flutes to string and percussion instruments, designed to be
played live. (Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

The second, "Disarm", is an installation of mechanical musical
instruments, which can either be automated or played live by an individual
operator using a laptop computer or midi keyboard. (Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

A guitar made from recycled gun
parts is shown at Reyes' "Disarm" exhibition. (Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

Indian
children dressed as Lord Krishna (L) and Radha play with coloured powder during
a Holi celebration at a temple in Amritsar on Tuesday. Holi, also called
the Festival of Colours, is a popular Hindu spring festival observed in India at
the end of the winter season on the last full moon day of the lunar month and
falls on March 27 this year. (NARINDER NANU/AFP/Getty
Images)

According to TZ Online, the latest victim is reportedly a 73-year-old man from the United Arab Emirates who fell sick in Abu Dhabi and was flown by private jet to Munich for treatment. Fifty people who came in contact with this patient are now being monitored for any symptoms of the disease.

German newspaper Bild reports that the victim was from a "ruling family" in Dubai and caught the infection at a camel race. There is strong evidence to suggest the virus comes from bats, which may be infecting another animal that more frequently comes into contact with humans.

This is Germany's second imported case of the novel coronavirus -- the first was a patient who fell sick in Qatar and recovered in November after being treated at a specialty clinic in Germany.

This latest fatality comes on the heels of another death from the novel coronavirus, this one in the United Kingdom. The Birmingham Mailreported on Saturday that Abid Hussain -- a 60-something father of two who recently visited Saudi Arabia with his daughter -- succumbed to the virus on March 19. He fell sick in late January shortly after returning from his trip, according to the newspaper.

Hussain's wife and daughter were not by his side when he died because they were in Pakistan burying Hussain's son, Khalid, who was also infected with the novel coronavirus and died February 17. According to the Birmingham Mail, Khalid, a father of two, was undergoing chemotherapy when his father returned from Saudi Arabia and, in all likelihood, infected him with the virus.

A third person, reportedly a 30-year-old woman who visited Hussain in the hospital, was also mildly infected but has now recovered.

Update 2: the World Health Organization has now posted an official statement on the latest coronavirus developments.

Jennifer Yang is the Toronto Star’s global health reporter.
She previously worked as a general assignment reporter and won a NNA in
2011 for her explanatory piece on the Chilean mining disaster. Follow
her on Twitter: @jyangstar

03/25/2013

Actress Tilda Swinton
performs the art of sleeping in her one-person piece called "The Maybe," in New
York's Museum of Modern Art, Monday. In "The Maybe," first
performed at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 1995, Swinton lies sleeping in
a glass box for the day. The exhibit will move locations within the museum every
time Swinton performs. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

Boris Berezovsky
outside a London court in March 2010, after winning a libel suit against a
Russian journalist. (Alastair
Grant/AP)

"There are no coincidences” is one of those untraceable quotes.

As untraceable as the possible connections among deaths of at least three prominent Russians – and enemies of the Kremlin -- in Britain in less than a decade.

British media and security experts are asking whether that’s too many to put down as mere accidents of fate. Or the work of Russian hit squads playing out political or financial feuds on the highways and byways of Britain.

Boris Berezovsky, a brilliant mathematician-turned-Russian official-turned oligarch – was found dead in his locked bathroom Saturday in a secluded Berkshire mansion. The police said there was “no evidence of third party involvement” and suicide was suspected. The autopsy results are pending.

Some friends say Berezovsky was deeply despondent after losing most of his vast fortune in a $5 billion legal grudge-fest with fellow mogul Roman Abramovich and receiving a humiliating tongue-lashing from the judge.

His $53 million bill for legal costs was followed by a claim for $7.6 million in compensation from his former girlfriend over a house sale. The onetime billionaire was said to be worried about supporting his six children.

But Berezovsky was under charges of fraud, money-laundering and political manipulation in Russia, and British police warned him six years ago of an assassination plot against him.

He was also an associate of 52-year-old Georgian billionaire Badri Patarkatsishvili, who died in his own mansion in southern England in 2008 – of apparent heart failure – after hiring bodyguards to protect him against an attack.

And coincidentally (or not) Berezovsky was a friend and supporter of Alexander Litvenenko, a renegade former KGB agent who met a grisly death in a London hospital in 2006, poisoned by radioactive polonium.

British investigators suspect former KGB officer and Russian politician Andrei Lugovoi, who denies the charge and is protected by parliamentary immunity. An inquest will be held in London this fall.

But last November, another mysterious death, in a leafy London suburb, started the conspiracy wheels turning again in Moscow’s direction.

Alexander Perepilichny, a wealthy 44-year-old asset manager as retiring as Berezovsky was flamboyant, would never have made headlines in Hello magazine. But he also ran afoul of the Kremlin when he found, to his shock, that Russian whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky had died in prison after alerting the authorities to a massive alleged tax fraud reaching up to senior levels of government.

Realizing that some of his clients might be involved in the scheme, Perepilichny took a large sum of money and ran to Britain with his family in 2009. He opened the books on Swiss bank accounts, which were sent to the Swiss police, and an investigation spread to six countries, with the suspects’ bank accounts being frozen.

Death threats followed. Although his home was heavily guarded, Perepilichny died at the roadside while on an early morning jog. Autopsy results were “inconclusive,” and police toxicology reports are due this month.

Another “coincidence:” a suspect in the Litvenenko murder is said to have launched legal action against Perepilichny for “failing to pay back debts,” according to the Guardian.

Five others allegedly linked to the Magnitsky investigation of tax fraud -- and a network of allegedly corrupt officials and criminals -- have died in Russia since the late tax lawyer began his probe. One was said to have fallen off a building while “his heart felt poorly.”

Are these coincidences, or a web too tangled to be unwoven in a court of law?

Here’s a last word from acerbic Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov, in Laughter in the Dark:
“A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.”

Olivia Ward was bureau chief in Moscow in the 1990s. She has covered conflicts, politics and human rights from the former Soviet Union to the Balkans, Northern Ireland, the Middle East and South Asia, winning both national and international awards.

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